Tales of an Expat in China

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The Christmas season was approaching and there was something I wanted to address before the break. I called my sales agent, Bert, into my office.

“Bert, I have a question about Shanghai Pinnacle Cleverness Company. They don’t seem up to the task. Why are we using them?”

Bert puffed on his cigarette.

“Yes, yes, very good. Best.”

“But they don’t really have much experience with our software or with B-to-B software in general, and we’re up against some pretty well established multi-national firms. Why are we using them as our exclusive distributor?”

“Yes, I agree, is must,” Bert paused to enjoy a series of rapid-fire coughs, then added, “the exclusive…is only.”

By now I had stopped trying to make sense of his baffling syntax and circuitous reasoning. I spoke loudly and slowly, as if to a deaf person:

“I WOULD LIKE TO MEET WITH THEM. CAN YOU SET UP A MEETING?”

“Very busy,” Bert said, “set up, yes.” He coughed and then got up and said, “Excuse me for the meeting,” as he exited through the fumes.

Clearly one of us was misunderstanding. Perhaps it was the cultural disconnect but I felt like something fishy was going on. It wasn’t the first time I had questioned Bert about the company yet I wasn’t any closer to comprehending the situation. Maybe it was Bert as middleman that was the problem. If I could talk to the vendor directly – or at least through a translator, but in the same room – I could figure out if they had anything to offer.

The next week I asked Bert again about the meeting with Shanghai Pinnacle Cleverness Company.

“Yes. The meeting. Yes. Set up. Excuse me for the important call.” He then answered his cellphone though I hadn’t noticed it ringing.

Did Bert mean that he had set up the meeting, or that he was going to set up the meeting? I couldn’t tell, but I didn’t receive any details later that day.

The next day I asked again.

“Yes, the meeting, very busy. After Christmas holiday,” said Bert.

“Are they actually celebrating Christmas?” I asked.

“Yes, Christmas. Busy. Meeting in January. Is best.”

“Can we nail down a date and time?” I asked loudly and clearly.

“Hmm?”

I realized I couldn’t use any slang phrases.

“WHEN…CAN…WE…HAVE…THE…MEETING? I need to know the date and time. When?”

“Yes, the date, time. Is okay,” Bert said. After a pause he continued with, ”Just.”

Then he was out the door again. I couldn’t decide if I should be sensitive to Chinese culture and go with the flow, or fire him on the spot for being a pain in the ass. I decided to wait and see.

I went back to my tiny corner office suite and sat behind my toy desk to answer some emails.

At least I’ve secured a place to live for my family, I thought. With that settled, the rest could wait. It relaxed me to remember that that had been my priority and I had succeeded in it. Family came first and it would be a great holiday in our new home. No one could take that away from us.

The toy phone on my toy desk rang.

“Oh, hi Cindy, what’s up?”

“Sorry, the house is no longer available.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean? We signed a contract on it!”

“Oh, the contract. Contract is not meaning anything,” Cindy replied.

“…So then why did I sign it?” I replied irately.

“Oh, it is just for the agreement.”

She was beginning to sound like Bert. Maybe it was a cultural thing.

“But we don’t have an agreement!” I said as smoke puffed out of my ears. “If we had an agreement I’d have a place to live!”

“Yes, the place to live, ha ha.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Oh, there are many other houses. Almost the same,” Cindy said.

And that was that. We were back to square one.

The useless contract I signed. (Signatures blurred to protect the innocent.)

I started to wonder about all the other bits of paper I had signed since arriving in China. Were they meaningless too? What about the contracts we would need to sign with customers? Would they also be meaningless?

The next day Ming and I were back to house hunting. Cindy was right about the other houses in Regency Park – most of them were the same. Driving around the neighborhood was like a Twilight Zone episode: whatever street you turned down, you found yourself back on the same street you just turned off of. I wondered if I would need a GPS for an evening stroll.

We settled on an identical house. I asked if we could skip the agreement step given its apparent uselessness, but this wasn’t allowed. So I signed it and suggested we file it in the garbage can to cut down on clutter.

***

To Be Continued…

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Cindy got right on it. Within a few days Ming and I were on our way to look at houses in the Regency Park complex. As expected the builder had brought together some of the best characteristics of Western homes while being careful not to include any architectural details that might suggest we were in China. As we drove through the sprawling complex, a migrant worker pedaled toward us on a three-wheeled bicycle cart piled impossibly high with discarded cardboard. He rode past a gleaming purple Bentley and a bright yellow Porsche Cayenne, parked on the street in front of one of the newly constructed upscale homes. The juxtaposition was an unambiguous reminder that we could be nowhere other than in modern China.

We parked and entered the first house on our list. It was a three-story home with amazing floor-to- vaulted-ceiling windows.

“Speak for yourself,” I said, “I’m trying to put on 20 pounds by Christmas.”

“Oh, but you are already very fat,” Cindy said earnestly.

Only in China: A migrant worker trundles past a purple Bentley and a yellow Porsche.

I might have gotten upset at Cindy’s comment if I hadn’t grown so used to such remarks. Historically, only wealthy people in China could afford enough food to become even the slightest bit pudgy. When China’s new trajectory toward a market oriented economy began in the late 80s, Deng Xiaoping famously said, “To get rich is glorious.” Complimenting someone by telling them they look fat was almost an extension of this famous exhortation. I wondered to what extremes one could take this:

“Your business must be doing well, you are very fat,” said Chinese guy #1.

“Oh, thank you very much! Did I mention that your wife has an enormous ass?” replied Chinese guy #2.

“You honor my family, but it is you who are on the fast track to morbid obesity,” said Chinese guy #1.

“You are too kind, hopefully we will all get gout soon and become invalids.”

On the other hand, try complimenting an American guy by telling him his wife has a big ass. I wondered how many Chinese traveling abroad must have learned the hard way that this is a huge – no pun intended – social faux pas in the West.

Just across from the elevator, and roughly the same size was the kitchen, which had but two burners on the stove.

The small stovetop reminded me of an aspect of Chinese cooking that had puzzled me for years. My father-in-law, while staying with us in New York, would often prepare dinner. This would typically consist of four or five dishes, plus rice. His approach was to cook the first dish, transfer it to a bowl and put it on the table. He then prepared the second dish, transferred it to a bowl, put it on the table, and so forth. By the time dinner was ready, all but the last dish was cold.

I always wondered if the problem was the inadequacy of our stove, which had a mere four burners. Were the burners too close together for him to use more than one at a time? Was he trying to leave the extra burners open in case I wanted to cook something else? Was he trying to save energy? Did he not know that the other knobs operated the other burners? I could never figure it out.

But here, in this modern kitchen in Shanghai, it all became clear: single burner stoves must have been the norm in China. The house we were seeing was a high-end one, so the builder had outdone himself by doubling the number of burners. Yet it still didn’t add up for me – we would need four burners if we were going to be able to become obese without having to eat cold food.

I walked the flight of stairs down to the basement and waited for the others to arrive in the elevator. It was nicely finished and spacious. There would be room for a playroom, a bar, and even a ping-pong table.

In a room off to the side, there was a modern looking washer and dryer. I was pleased that it had no markings in English on it. That would be the perfect excuse for me to never do the laundry.

“Look at this nice closet here in the laundry room,” I said.

“Ha, ha, not the closet,” said Cindy. “That’s for the Ayi.”

Ayi means “aunt” in Chinese, but it’s also a term typically used for domestic help, like Nannies.

“No! Really? We can’t make Lili sleep in here. There’s barely enough room for a bed.”

“Yes, bed. She very happy here. And next to laundry machines. Very convenient for the work.” Cindy said, letting her true identity as a real estate agent shine through.

As I climbed the two flights of stairs to the bedroom level, I wondered if Cindy had meant what she said or if she was just spouting another line of her real estate puffery. I pondered whether this was a human rights violation as I again waited for the others to arrive via the elevator.

Lili had been living with us for a few weeks by that point. She was from a small village in Sichuan province, had a great attitude and had been pretty much working 24/7 except when she took breaks to sleep. She cleaned the floors, cooked the meals, did the laundry and helped the kids with their Chinese homework. She had a great attitude, always smiled, got on well with the kids, and all this for less than $500 a month.

I pondered this for a moment, and thought that perhaps Cindy was right. Maybe she would be happy in a tiny room next to the laundry machines. Other people from villages like hers all across China were flocking to the cities in unprecedented numbers for factory jobs that paid far less in far worse conditions. Many of these poor migrants would toil 10 to 12 hours a day in dingy factories exposed to any number of chemicals, toxins and other hazards. The work would often be monotonous if not downright mind numbing. At the end of each day, they would retire to an adjoining equally dingy dormitory building. And at the end of each month, they would pocket little more than the equivalent of $100. Thought of in this context, Lili had practically hit the jackpot. And besides, could there be a better way to spend a day than with my kids?

By the time we finished touring the house, I was on board with the idea that Lili indeed would love living next to the laundry machine.

Two blocks away, we had a look at a newer house. This one was one story taller. I was thinking that the elevator might actually come in handy when I realized that this house didn’t have one. I wondered if this was a product of some miscommunication between the architect and the contractor.

“No, you dimwit, I wanted the elevators in the taller houses,” said the contractor.

“Oh, but then the cables would need to be longer, and that would cost more. To save you money, we put them in the shorter houses,” replied the architect.

I liked the taller house. And the stairs would help me get into shape. We quickly signed a rental contract with the owner and were scheduled to move in in about 2 weeks – just before Christmas. And what perfect timing: our furniture was on schedule to arrive at the Shanghai port any day now, and would need a week or two to clear customs.

It felt good to have the housing issue settled. Finally I would be able to devote myself fully to my new job. I had been in my new China role for little more than a month, but perplexing problems were already beginning to form.

Over the last week the kids had started school at the Yew Chung International School of Shanghai while Ming and I continued scouring Pudong for the right place to live. We had kept Cindy on as our agent mainly to see if, with our counseling, her lying would improve.

It was a Monday morning and Ming and I were accompanying the kids to their classrooms so we could see what they had been up to and to get a minute’s face time with their teachers.

Little Leo dropped the four of us off on the street in front of the school. We walked the 20 feet or so to the outer-gates where we were met by a Chinese guard who smiled and gave me an enthusiastic nihao or “hello.” He squirted some sanitizing liquid into my hand, then pointed a gun-like device at my forehead and pulled the trigger. On our visit a week earlier, this had unnerved me. I didn’t know if he was trying to incapacitate me or was looking for a bar code. This time I didn’t duck or throw a punch since I knew he was merely checking for fever. The gun beeped, and I was allowed to pass. This process was repeated for Ming, Mayla and Ike. I wasn’t sure what the fever check really meant. Were they just being cautious or was there some serious illnesses circulating?

We made our way in the rain across the puddle-laden outer courtyard, which consisted of a running track, sports field and jungle gym. After a hundred yards we arrived at an empty drop off circle for cars just in front of the school. Curious, I thought. Weren’t drop-off circles for dropping off the kids? The road leading up to it looked in good shape, so why make us walk so far? I wrote it off as one of the many small mysteries that is part of life in China and went inside.

A tall, smiling guy with an Australian accent introduced himself as “Mr. Hair.” It was an ironic name, as he had no hair at all. However, unlike bald men in American movies, he did not seem the least bit evil. In fact he was behaving in an extremely friendly and helpful manner.

Mr. Hair brought us to the classrooms, which were decorated in colorful posters, banners and signs. Each classroom also had an LCD projector with a touchable “smart screen” driven by the teacher’s Mac. Things were looking promising.

As a bilingual school, Yew Chung had a co-teaching arrangement. Each classroom was staffed by two teachers, one western and one Chinese. Mr. Hair made the introductions, and we chatted a little with each of them before class. The Chinese teachers could speak English, but not vice versa. They were friendly, seemed competent and told me that Ike and Mayla were good students and were getting along well in their new environment. Compared with the rest of my experience thus far in China, the school felt like a real Oasis.

Our Oasis in Shanghai: The Yew Chung International School

“Mayla, we’re leaving now,” I said.

She ignored me as she chatted with her new friends.

“Mayla?” I said.

I waved my hand past her face. Still nothing.

“Mayla, Mommy and Daddy are leaving now,” I said.

She diverted her gaze just enough to give me an almost imperceptible “bye.”

Her meaning was clear: I’m talking to my friends and you’re embarrassing me. This was good news – what else was could be a better indicator that she had adjusted to her new school?

Over in Ike’s classroom there was also evidence of adaptation. He was playing monsters with the other kids.

“Daddy, do you want to be a monster?” Ike asked.

“I’d love to but I have other commitments,” I answered.

With the kids seemingly well settled, we picked up a copy of our tuition invoice at the school office. The amount, in RMB, was an impossibly large number. I converted it to dollars in my head and realized that the school offered another benefit: I would learn what it felt like to have two kids in college.

On our way out, I noticed that while the classrooms and office were toasty warm, the hallways were freezing. It was a cold November day, yet a good number of the hallway windows were open to the outside. Growing up in America, this was a no-no. If anyone left a window or door open in the winter, someone – usually my dad – would yell, “Are you crazy? That heat is expensive. You think money grows on trees or something?”

But I’d seen this sort of behavior before in China.

Several years earlier, after Ming and I were married, but before we had kids, I was in China for some meetings. Ming’s parents suggested I stay with them in Shanghai for the weekend. Wanting to know my in-laws a little better – or possibly because I figured it would score me a few points back home – I gladly agreed.

It was March and still winter outside. Ming’s parents lived in an apartment near the Huangpu River in Shanghai. It was wonderful: Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a beautiful living room and a terrace with amazing views of the river and the Shanghai skyline. But there was a problem: It was 2 degrees C (36 F) in the apartment! While this was a near perfect temperature to go ice fishing in, it was not one that I generally associated with indoor living. In fact, I believe it was temperatures like this that led human beings to come up with the very concept of “indoors” in the first place.

“Would you like a left-handed calendar?” my mother-in-law asked in Chinese.

I knew her to be sane, so I figured the problem was with my Chinese.

She tried again, but all I deciphered was, “Can I buy a vowel?” I was pretty sure she wasn’t trying to play Wheel of Fortune.

When she pointed at the thermostat in the guestroom, I worked out that she was actually saying, “Would you like the heat on?”

Somehow they had sensed that I was not a polar bear. I eagerly agreed, cranked up the heat to a toasty 24 C (75 F), made some idle ­– and largely incomprehensible – chit chat, then retired into a deep, jet lag assisted sleep.

At 5 am, my bladder awakened me. The bathroom was on the other side of the apartment, the part with the heat turned off. I got fully dressed, put on my parka and hat, and ventured toward my destination. I was certain that it was now below freezing in the living room. The bathroom was no better. I wondered why the pipes hadn’t frozen.

On the way back, I realized that the door to the outside terrace was open, as was the kitchen window. I closed them both and went back to bed.

When I emerged from my slumber a few hours later, they were both open again.

“Very cold. Window open,” I said in my highly insufficient Chinese.

After the usual two or three misfires, I worked their response out to be, “Yes, good. The air is very fresh.”

I wished that my dad were here and that he knew enough Chinese to say, “Are you crazy? You’re throwing money out the window!” Then again maybe they weren’t throwing money out the window. Apart from my room, the heat wasn’t just set to low in the apartment, but rather was completely off so far as I could tell.

I imagined him saying it nonetheless. And in my mind, I had him add, “And the air is not fresh here at all. It’s filthy, disgusting and polluted! So close the friggin’ windows!”

When I related this arctic-like adventure to Ming, she told me that when she was a child in Shanghai, one winter was so cold that she got frostbite on her fingers while sleeping. I replied that when I was a child in New York, one winter was so cold that we closed the windows.

I closed the hall window in the school as we left. We walked through the empty drop-off circle again and out into the rain, which was coming down harder now. Little Leo was waiting diligently on the far side of the sports field.

“You know, Little Leo seems to be a pretty decent driver,” I said to Ming.

“Oh, I’m glad you think so too,” she said, taking the bait.

“So why the heck didn’t he drop us off right here in the drop off circle?”

“Maybe he doesn’t know about it.”

“Hmmm,” I said as I scratched my chin and wondered why other cars weren’t using the circle either.

As Ming and I got back into the Buick, she pointed out the window from the front seat and said, “Honey, what’s that over there?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “but it looks like a nice housing complex. And it’s in walking distance to the school.”

“Hey, Little Leo, can you drive us into this compound so we can take a look around?” Ming said.

Technically, in order to get past the guard gate at the entrance to one of these compounds, you either had to live there or be invited. That didn’t faze Little Leo. He drove up to the guard booth and, with a confident look on his face that said, “I drive a Buick minivan and I have important foreigners in the back,” the guard saluted and the gate went up. I wasn’t sure if this meant that I had a great driver, or was touring a housing complex with lax security.

The compound was called Regency Park. I was used to the absurdity of the names by now. I didn’t even chuckle as we passed the street signs for Park Avenue, Mont Blanc Road and Giverny Drive. The houses didn’t look particularly Asian, let alone Chinese, but those things didn’t matter anymore to me. It was close to the school, and – I hoped – not next to a factory.

Despite the eternally gray skies, Regency Park had potential. Plus, it was close to the school.

It was curious that Cindy hadn’t suggested this place. Perhaps there was something wrong with it. Maybe Jiang Zhemin’s son didn’t like the mailboxes. I had to find out.

Palm Springs, Golden Oscar and Buckingham Villa were too far from the school. Vizcaya had no backyard. Green Hills stank and Beverly Hills was short a bedroom.

We had also stopped at a few high-rise apartment buildings in the intervening week. Century Garden was one of them. In the elevator, I noticed there were no 4th or 14th floors. In some Chinese dialects, the word for “four” sounds like the word for “death.” At least there was no superstition surrounding 13, and that’s where we were headed. As we looked around one apartment, I noticed that the windows could be opened wide – no child safety latches.

“Oh, those can be added easily,” Cindy said.

That might have been true, but there was no doubt in my mind that the kids would find friends in other units, and that those units would have the same problem. I guess we could host all playdates in our apartment but that wouldn’t be practical. As we waited for the elevator on the freezing cold 13th floor, a man snuffed out a cigarette and tossed the butt out an open window. That was the icing on the cake. With so many smokers in Shanghai, how could this place not be a deathtrap? Despite the expertise that the Chinese had recently gained in so many areas, putting out high rise fires didn’t strike me as a core competence. In fact, I read somewhere that Shanghai has a fraction of the firefighting capacity of a typical American city. That was it. High rises were out.

This Shanghai apartment building burned down a few months after we ruled out high rises. Good thing we didn’t move here!

Time was running short for us, and there was still no obvious answer. The winner would have to be the lesser of many evils. I thought about each property. Maybe I was being too hard on Dong Jiao. The Chinese-style grounds were beautiful. And despite the late nineties interior design catastrophe, the house would at least be comfortable. I remembered Cindy’s comment about the clean air. That was important to me.

I phoned her when I got to the office.

“Cindy, I’d like to see Dong Jiao again.”

“Sure, I can arrange it. When?”

“How about tomorrow morning? Our driver will be taking Ming to work at that time, but if you can pick me up around 8:15 so we can see the house at 8:30, that would be great.”

“Okay, no problem.”

“Oh, and please don’t be late. I have an important meeting and need to be back in my office by 10.”

“No problem, Erik. See you at 8:15.”

The following morning I waited for Cindy by the living room window. 8:15 came and went. At 8:30, I figured she’d be arriving at any moment. I called her anyway to double-check.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. The traffic is very heavy this morning. I will be there in a few minutes.”

There was still time to make my meeting so I went outside and waited on the street. If this dragged on another 15 minutes or so, I would have a decision to make. Either I’d have to cancel my meeting or cancel Cindy.

Twenty minutes went by. It was already past decision time. I called Cindy to check on her ETA.

“Oh, so much traffic, but I am almost there.”

“So you’re very close?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, I will be there very soon.”

Another ten minutes passed. I really needed to settle the housing situation, so I cancelled my meeting, and kept waiting for Cindy. I was in the contact center optimization business. The world would go on if I missed a meeting.

The traffic in Shanghai was a problem and there wasn’t anything Cindy or I could do about it. At least this way I wouldn’t have to rush.

So I waited. And waited. I called Cindy once more after 45 minutes to make sure she wasn’t playing a practical joke on me.

“Yes, I’m very nearby.”

Maybe there was something lost in translation. “Cindy, are you traveling by rickshaw by any chance?”

“Haha, I’m almost there!” she said.

Maybe she was lost and didn’t want to admit it. “Do you have the address right? One Long Dong?” I hoped she understood that I meant the address.

“Yes, yes, I know.”

It was frustrating but I understood what had happened. She had gotten herself into a situation from which there was no graceful exit. She couldn’t very well say, “Okay, I woke up at 8:27 and when I told you at 8:30 that I was almost there, I was actually just getting into a cab on the opposite end of town, knowing that the world’s worst traffic lay ahead.”

I wasn’t surprised that Cindy had been economical with the truth. And actually I wasn’t even angry about it. I was surprised, perhaps even shocked, however, that I had found a real estate agent who hadn’t mastered the art of lying.

In America I don’t think you can pass the real estate licensing exam without having learned some basic deception skills. A better trained agent would have said something like there’s a pile up on the highway and I’m helping pull people to safety or that a family of pandas had escaped from the zoo and was running amok along the highway. At least these lies were imaginative and would have demonstrated a certain industriousness.

She finally picked me up and I believe I detected some embarrassment. Maybe it was just me being embarrassed for her. We drove to Dong Jiao State Guest House in light traffic.

The house and neighborhood seemed to check out on my second visit. The place was functional, we’d have fresh air, and it wasn’t far from school or work. As Cindy kept chattering away about Jiang Zhemin’s son and the clean air in that neighborhood, I was coming around. Even better, the price was within range. Most important, I was out of time.

I decided right then and there that Dong Jiao would be it for us. Cindy was elated. It’s probably rare in her industry for extreme tardiness to be rewarded with a commission.

As we drove back through the elegant Chinese gardens, I was feeling good about my decision. The guard saluted as we exited the compound. It made me feel like a general. I saluted back and wondered if he felt as silly about it as I did.

I called Ming to tell her the good news.

“Hey, it’s me. I think we have a new home,” I said as we turned right onto the main road and drove past a gigantic smokestack.

“That’s great,” she said.

“Actually, let me call you back,” I said as I did a double take over my shoulder.

The smokestack was spewing an enormous cloud of white and grey filth. How could I not have seen it before? Had we come via a different route?

“Cindy?” I said pointing at the spectacle.

She turned to look at it, “Yes?”

“There’s a smokestack there. It’s directly across the street from Dong Jiao. Have you not seen that before?”

Deadpan, she said, “Oh, they have smokestacks all over Shanghai, but it is quite far from Dong Jiao.”

“Quite far from Dong Jiao? It’s right next to Dong Jiao. It’s practically in Dong Jiao!”

“But the air is completely clean here. This is the cleanest air in Shanghai. Jiang Zhemin’s son wouldn’t stay there if the air was polluted.”

Her fingers must have been crossed behind her back.

I was incredulous. How could she possibly be sticking to her story? Her perjury was so amateur. Maybe it was a ruse to get me to appreciate one of the other terrible places we’d seen.

“I think this is going to be a problem, Cindy.”

This must be the source of the cleanest air in Shanghai.

As Cindy chattered on about how clear the air was, some things became clear to me: A smokestack was not a step up from an electrical transmission tower and Jiang Zhemin’s son had his head up his ass if he thought the air around here wasn’t polluted. Maybe this is why China has such terrible pollution – the guys at the top either don’t notice it or don’t care.

I felt no ill will toward Cindy, but I needed someone I could trust. I needed an agent who understood my western way of doing business. I needed someone whose lies I could not detect until after the lease was signed and the check had cleared.

The next weekend we asked a real estate agent to show us some houses and apartments that weren’t in the shadow of a giant electrical tower.

Little Leo drove Ming, the kids and me to a compound about twenty minutes down the road from One Long Dong Avenue where we were to meet her. We sat idling in the Buick minivan at the entrance gate for a few minutes, and then a taxi pulled up just on time, and out came an attractive young woman. Little Leo opened the sliding electric door.

“Hi, my name is Cindy. It’s very nice to meet you.” she said in quite reasonable English.

She climbed in and we were off.

So much had changed since my first visit to China in the early 90s when it was so difficult for Westerners to find their way on the mainland. English was everywhere now, and just like their compatriots from Hong Kong had done before them, more and more mainland Chinese had taken English names. Even the compound had an English name: Palm Springs.

As we drove through the neighborhood I saw neither palm trees nor springs. It reminded me more of Boca Raton than Palm Springs. In Boca the gated complexes with cookie-cutter houses often had foreign names, like Vista Del Mar, Les Chateaux Elysées, or Maison Derriere. (Okay, I got that one from the Simpsons.) That way old people from Long Island could feel like they were retiring in style. Maybe that was okay in cheesy culture-free Florida, but this was China, which had five thousand years of rich history to draw upon.

“Palm Springs?” I muttered sarcastically to Ming as we entered the house.

“Try to forget about the name and think about the house,” Ming said.

There she went again, being rational while I was trying to approach things from an entirely emotional perspective. Women.

As we got out of the van, Ike, my 4-year-old son, got diverted by a green plastic see-saw in the shape of a fish in the neighbor’s yard.

“Ike, we have to go inside,” Ming said. “We have to make sure we like it.”

“Why?” Ike asked.

“So your dad doesn’t make us move again.”

“Why?” Mayla asked.

“Because we don’t want to keep moving,” Ming said.

“Why?” Ike said.

“How about we play a game,” I said. “Let’s see which kid can be quiet the longest. Ready? Go!”

For the next 10 seconds, the kids were totally silent.

The owner greeted us at the front door. He was a Chinese guy in his mid-thirties. In case that isn’t enough to draw a picture of him, let me add this detail: he had black hair. Does that help?

The home was done up with an elegant American southwest motif. The bedrooms were spacious. The bathrooms were modern. The living room and dining room were stylish.

While Cindy was out of earshot Ming said to me, “This house is really nice.”

I couldn’t disagree. The place wasn’t bad at all. But in the interest of being a sarcastic pain in the ass I said, “Yes, I’ve always wanted to live in Santa Fe.”

Ming laughed. Whether she was laughing at me or with me is a matter of judgment.

I really did want to know why they had chosen the southwestern American motif. I’d seen this Chinese habit of imitation before on a smaller scale: designer jeans, knock-off golf clubs, and my favorite: fake antibiotics. But this was a whole neighborhood! It struck me as absurd. If I were to move to New Mexico, would I want to live in a Chinese pagoda?

In the basement, the owner stopped at an amazingly elaborate contraption with a maze of dials, switches, electronic displays, and several pipes coming out of it.

“Cool!” Ike said, “A spaceship!”

“Spaceships don’t have so many parts,” I said.

“This is the whole house water filter,” the Chinese guy with black hair said, pointing to the left half of the unit. “It’s for the heavy metals in the water.”

“And this,” he went on, now aiming at the right side of the unit, “will make the water softer.”

“So you can drink this water directly now?” I asked.

“Oh no, better to drink the bottled water. But this is good for laundry.”

Great, I thought, wondering what could be in the water to make it unsuitable for washing clothes.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Mayla announced.

“Oh, of course,” the homeowner said, pointing her to a door down the hall.

For the first time in my life I wanted to tell her not to wash her hands when she was done.

We thanked the Chinese guy with black hair and drove on to another compound down the road.

“This is the Hollywood celebrities’ villa,” Cindy said as we entered the complex.

“Hmm?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“This compound is Golden Oscar. It is the Oscar villa.”

I still had no idea what she was talking about.

“The prize of the famous movies,” she said.

I stared at her like a dog watching TV.

“Are we going to the movies?” Ike asked hopefully.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Who’s Oscar?” Mayla said.

“Oscar the Grouch?” asked Ike. I wasn’t aware that he was watching Sesame Street.

“So this housing complex has been named after the American movie award, the Oscar?” Ming said.

“Yes, Golden Oscar, just like in Hollywood,” Cindy said.

“Oh, right, of course!” I now understood enough to continue with my sarcasm. “Do they sell maps to the stars’ houses?”

Ming laughed and Cindy politely giggled along with her, then said, “Yes, of course, a map,” and handed me a generic map of Shanghai with her company’s logo on it.

As we drove through Golden Oscar, I kept an eager eye out for some references to Hollywood. Perhaps some busts of famous actors, a little imitation memorabilia, or maybe a small version of the Hollywood sign leaning up against a mound of dirt. But there were none that I could see. No Walk of Fame, no movie stars, no Oscar statuettes, nothing. How could they invoke Hollywood and have none of these things? There weren’t even any losers pretending to be producers. You call this Hollywood? No way.

We looked at a few houses. They were decent but unremarkable. I was having trouble getting past the Chinese marketing strategy of using just the name of a famous place, and having no follow-through. Golden Oscar was like a theme park but the theme was only in the brochure. I decided to explore the topic a bit with Cindy.

“Is Golden Oscar supposed to be like Beverly Hills?”

“Oh, Beverly Hills. You want to go to Beverly Hills? We go there next,” Cindy said excitedly.

I was sorry I asked.

We saw a few more houses in Golden Oscar, and then made our way to Beverly Hills.

As I might have guessed, Beverly Hills was neither hilly nor “Beverly-ish.” While there was nothing particularly wrong with these houses, there was nothing special about them either. They were all right next to one another, and could have passed for any non-descript development in America.

Of course, it wasn’t lost on me that if these houses were truly on the scale of the real Beverly Hills, they would be way out of our league. These were among the nicest places to live in Shanghai – perhaps even in China – but they didn’t begin to mirror what real wealth could buy in America.

This is perhaps what I found annoying. I was looking for a comfortable house with an Asian style, something that would embody the best characteristics of my new environment. Instead, I was finding silly imitations of the world I left behind. In fact, the whole notion of a “Beverly Hills” in Shanghai seemed so phony that it made me feel as if I were on a bus tour through a Hollywood back lot. Unfortunately no one yelled “cut!”

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Chinese real estate industry was onto something. I wondered if I could rent my house back home for more money if I called it the Heavenly Palace. I could then name the backyard fence the Great Wall of China. It was worth a shot. Maybe a Chinese family would be interested.

The Beverly Hills house was short a bedroom, so we moved on.

The rest of the afternoon was a blur of compounds with more aspirational names. Green Hills was neither green nor hilly and had a funny smell to it. A better name would have been Sulfur Plains. Vizcaya was a Spanish-themed compound that did actually hint of the original in Miami, but didn’t include the elaborate gardens. In fact, the houses there didn’t have backyards at all. Since I was foolish enough to ship our patio furniture from New York, that just wouldn’t do. Buckingham Villa had potential until I learned that half of the houses in the complex were uninhabited, apparently due to mold. And besides, it was too far from the school. Pasadena didn’t seem at all Californian to me. Seasons Villa was interesting in that it used to be called Four Seasons Villa. But when the famous hotel chain complained, they changed the English name to Seasons Villa, although they continued calling it Four Seasons Villa in Chinese. If they had called it “Trademark Infringement Villa,” I would seriously have considered moving there.

Buckingham Villa in Shanghai.

The problem I had with these places was that they were pretending to be something they weren’t. They were trying to bask in the glory of some distant greatness but barely made an attempt to capture the style. Worse still, there wasn’t a single iota of Chinese-ness in any of these places. The developers were overlooking the most obvious selling point: traditional Chinese architecture is cool. China has an admiration for western-style living that borders on obsession. Worse still, they seem to be rejecting their own culture and traditions. I found it a little unsettling.

The real Buckingham Palace in London. I hear this place isn’t bad.

Imagine the opposite: Would we tear down pre-war buildings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to build something called the Great Wall Tower and Gardens? Would Parisians abandon French architecture in favor of traditional Chinese lane houses with names like Ville Tiananmen? What’s wrong with China’s sense of self that is causing it to discard its past?

Cindy was doing her best to help. There just didn’t seem to be anything available that was a good fit. I wondered if we’d been clear about what exactly it was that we were looking for.

“Cindy, don’t any of these places have a Chinese style to them?” I asked.

“Oh, you don’t want to live like Chinese. You would not be comfortable.”

Ming then said something to Cindy in Chinese that I didn’t quite catch. So much for all those years studying Mandarin.

“Ahh, there is one. I will take you to the Dong Jiao State Guest House.”

“Dong Jiao” – now that is clearly Chinese. It means “Eastern Suburbs”. And “State Guest House” sounds diplomatic. I had a good feeling about this one. And “Dong” would remain in my address. That could only be a good thing.

As we drove past the guard gate, we were surrounded by elaborate Chinese-style grounds. It was an enormous buffer zone of well cared for gardens. Elegant bridges with an oriental motif crisscrossed a network of meandering streams. A few pagodas dotted the landscape. For the first time all day, I felt like I was in Asia. Now this is what I had in mind.

“This property used to be for guests of state when they were on official business in Shanghai,” Cindy said.

“Really?” I perked up.

“Yes, in fact, the son of Jiang Zhemin, China’s former president, used to stay at this property when he visited Shanghai. This area has the best air in the whole city, so this is why he liked to stay here.”

This place was getting better and better! Finally I would get to see traditional Chinese architecture. And if it was good enough for Chinese dignitaries, how could it not be good enough for me?

We drove toward the far end of the gardens. I imagined the oriental houses with upturned roofs that would be just around the corner. My Blackberry beeped and I turned my attention to it for a few seconds. When I looked up, I couldn’t believe my eyes. We had gone past the Chinese gardens and were now surrounded by houses. Each had a driveway and garage. Several had porches. A few had basketball hoops in the front. All had post-mounted mailboxes. Where were we? Ohio? Wisconsin? North Carolina? It was impossible to know.

As we pulled up to a house, I noticed the words “U.S. Mail” on the mailbox. What was going on? Had we slipped through a portal of time and space while I was checking a text message? Or was I suffering from a rare form of homesickness that made my brain transform my surroundings into the familiar?

US Mail in Shanghai. Does the Postmaster General know about this?

I got out of the car to take a closer look at the mailbox. It was plastic. And not only did it say “U.S. Mail” but it also said “Approved by the Postmaster General.” What a colossal let down! In addition to there being no Chinese feel to this neighborhood, now my mail would be delayed, delivered to neighbors, or lost altogether!

“Do you think the Postmaster General knows about this?” I asked Ming.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get you a brush and you can paint over it,” she said, again being rational.

Inside the house, it was even worse. Cheap-looking American furniture. Think Rent-a-Center. 90s era all-white run-of-the-mill GE washer, dryer, refrigerator and an electric range. Was this really where China’s president’s son used to stay? In an American style house with crappy furnishings, cheap appliances and a USPS mailbox? I would have been ecstatic if I were the victim of the Chinese knockoff of Candid Camera, and I half expected a Chinese version of Allen Funt to spring up and point out the hidden cameras.

Had Jiang Zhemin’s son been through the same frustrating ordeal and settled for this? Maybe this seemed exotic and different to him. Was this the best there was out there?

“I’m tired of looking at houses. This is boring,” Mayla said.

“I want to see the movie now,” Ike said.

“Don’t worry, this is the last house,” Ming said. “Then Daddy and I will let you choose the best one.”

At least this place had the cleanest air in Shanghai. That was worth a lot to me. My children’s health was the top priority. Maybe that’s what it all came down to – even Jiang Zhemin’s son was just looking for some fresh air. Was it that simple? Or maybe he didn’t know zip+4 was bullshit. It was a shame we couldn’t get him on the phone.

I walked out of the elevator and down the hall to my new office. I was the boss of the Greater China arm of the company now and was looking forward to getting started. Julianna, the office manager, greeted me cordially and led me through the outer area and toward my next perk – the corner office. I never had a corner office before and as with the chauffeur, was at least slightly enthusiastic about this improvement in stature.

I followed her around the corner and into a tiny room that could easily have been mistaken for a supply closet, except that it was extremely low on paper, ink, coffee cups, and shelves to put them on. This would be the helm from which I would manage the expansion of our business into the world’s greatest market.

Okay, it wasn’t this bad, but you get the idea.

The smallness of the office was outdone only by the flimsiness of its contents. The desk was one of those with a peeling wood veneer finish that accounted for nearly a third of its thickness. The phone was one of those squeaky plastic types with a permanently tangled cord. In this age of ubiquitous smart phones I didn’t know you could still find these.

I hung my coat in the cabinet by the door and waited for the structure to stop swaying under the added weight. Julianna carefully squeezed out past me, being cautious not to upend the toy coat closet.

The main area had two small manager offices, each about half the size of mine, if you can imagine such a thing. The managers had glass partitions separating them from the rows of cubicles. Presumably this was so they could take important calls in private. But one of the managers was on the phone and the whole office could hear him clearly. It reminded me of the Cone of Silence in the old Get Smart TV series.

The cubicles were packed so tightly that when one of the employees stood to introduce himself, he accidentally snapped shut the laptop screen of the guy sitting behind him.

The whole setup was like being on an airplane. The cubes were coach, the tiny offices were first class, and I was sitting in the cockpit. But this was no Singapore Airlines. It was ValuJet, where first class means an extra inch of leg room.

I called one of the managers, Raymond, up to the cockpit.

“Wo men qu lou xia, zai xin ba ke kai hui ba,” he said to me.

I understood him perfectly: Let’s go downstairs to Starbucks for our meeting. My Chinese would be just fine.

We sat down with our coffees. Even though Starbucks had prominent no smoking signs posted, Raymond lit a cigarette and offered me one. Although I find smoking to be kind of disgusting, I appreciated the gesture.

We made small talk in Chinese for a few minutes, and then we got down to business.

“Supporting our most important reseller is going to require many shoes and three goats,” Raymond said in Chinese.

At least that’s how I understood it. Since Raymond didn’t seem to be out of his tree, I asked for clarification.

“Yes, the important partner. Three goats.” Raymond coughed, took a drag on his cigarette, then added, “And a chicken.”

It struck me that this wasn’t going to be easy. Raymond continued on in Chinese.

“They need exclusivity and a big discount, and exclusivity is not needed for the discount.”

At least there were no farm animals in this sentence. But it still didn’t make sense.

The useless glass partitions in the office reminded me of the “Cone of Silence.”

The problem with my Chinese was that I had never before used it for business, and was clearly missing some vocabulary. This was made worse by my difficulty in deciphering tones – pitches that change the meaning of a word. If you take away the tones, a single syllable like yang – which can mean goat – can also mean 30 or so other things. I pressed on anyway.

After half an hour, I learned that Raymond’s dry hacking cough likely had something to do with his chain smoking. I hadn’t learned much about the business during this time, though. To his credit, Raymond sensed this, and decided it would be more effective to try English. This came as a relief.

“The partner very strategic stadium security. Project is important must, and support is must.”

“Ah right, the strategic partner. Which one are you referring to?” I asked.

“Yes, partner. Important. Is must,” Raymond said with a few coughs along the way.

“For which stadium?”

“Yes, stadium. Must.”

Raymond seemed as proud of his English as I was of my Mandarin. He wheezed and took another drag on his cigarette.

We had arrived at an impasse. Trying to decipher Raymond’s sentences was like using Babelfish to translate a legal document. It was giving me a headache and the feeling was probably mutual. I considered taking up smoking for a moment, but then thought better of it.

Back up in the cockpit, I hoped things would go better with the other key manager, Walter.

“The realignment program that was recently implemented is having an unexpected effect on the team’s ability to focus on revenue augmentation for the fourth quarter,” Walter said in perfect corporate English without smoking or coughing.

My spirits lifted.

“If training and fulfillment can be propagated to ensure parallel skill development, we should be able to sustain continuous improvement while accelerating market acceptance indicators.”

My spirits soared.

Walter was speaking corporate gibberish, a language I had some background in. It was clear that he had been around the block with large multinationals. While I would have preferred direct, no nonsense communication, it was music to my ears compared to Raymond’s scrambled English or my own half-baked Chinese.

As with all corporate-speak though, eventually I started to lose focus. He had good insights into the business, but I got lost in his circuitous stream of catchphrases. My attention turned to his broken front tooth.

The only time you would ever see an American sales guy with a broken tooth would be right after he got into a bar fight or an accident. As Walter didn’t seem like a brawler and had no other visible bruises or broken bones, I wondered if America was unique in its obsession with the perfect smile.

I forced my attention back to what he was saying but after another hour and a half of “…productivity enhancement can be achieved while concurrently mitigating the justification of aberrant results,” my soaring spirits began to experience a negative growth trend.

In the end Walter wasn’t much better at communicating than Raymond. I needed a break to take care of some personal business and ponder the situation properly.

The office restroom had both a toilet and a urinal. Like most men, I have always appreciated the urinal, and once even knew a guy in New Jersey who had one installed in his home, much to his wife’s unending disapproval. But this was a unisex office restroom. Wouldn’t women take offense?

Perhaps not. In a country where many bathrooms still feature filthy squatting holes that require specialized targeting skills, a urinal was probably innocuous.

After washing my hands I noted there were neither paper towels nor an air dryer, just a tattered wet rag hanging from a hook on the wall. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be shared for drying hands – even though it was sopping wet – or intended for some other purpose like wiping the inside of the toilet bowl. Maybe it was for both?

It reminded me that so much of what we consider normal is a function of our upbringing. I imagine that if I grew up washing my hair in the toilet each morning and using the flush to rinse, I would find it odd if other cultures didn’t do the same.

The environment you grow up in until the age of five influences your development almost as strongly as the genetics you inherit, and is almost as hard to change. We all have a lens through which we see the world, and because of our cultural bias we often think that our own view is the only correct one. In this case, I’m sure mine was correct.

I shook my hands in the air and rubbed them on my trousers as I made a mental note to ask Julianna to buy some paper hand tissues.

My Fisher Price phone rang. I lifted the receiver but the tangled cord kept it from separating from the base. I pulled them apart with both hands and said hello. It was the local representative of the moving company. She was calling to inform me that our shipment from New York would arrive in less than five weeks.

“And I like confirm please,” she said in slightly stilted but reasonably serviceable English, “that delivery address is to the Number One Long Dong.”

I wanted to joke that there would be no Long Dong in my future, but she wouldn’t have understood. Where was Bill from Queens when I needed him?

I told her simply that we were planning to move and would let her know the address as soon as I knew. Then I wondered how we would find a new place in so little time.

Without time to shake the jet lag, I was already due at my new office. Living in Shanghai came with a few perks, one of which was a chauffeur-driven car service to help me and the family get around town. We would use it to take the kids to and from school and for Ming and me to go back and forth to our offices. Ming, who never particularly cared for driving, was over the moon about this perk. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic.

In New York, I tended to use a car service for one thing and one thing only: getting to and from the airport, and only when I’d be away for long enough that it wouldn’t make sense to park my own car there. I liked driving, and preferred the peace and quiet and sense of independence it offered, especially when compared with airport limo drivers who like to share their latest get-rich quick schemes, stock market theories or why the Giants are the best team in football.

To add insult to injury, in Shanghai I would be riding in the back of a Buick minivan. Somehow these vehicles – which aren’t sold in the US – had become ubiquitous among expats in China, and as such, served as something of a status symbol. I was having trouble wrapping my head around this. To me, driving a Buick meant, “I’ve given up on life and have settled for a car that doesn’t look out of place in the parking lot of an Applebee’s.”

My new office was only five miles from my home, and both were in Pudong, the newer and less crowded side of Shanghai. I expected it would be a 10 or 15 minute ride at most.

Ming and I got into the back of the Buick. The driver’s name was Liu. Ming informed me that I was to address him as Xiao Liu, which loosely translated is “Little Leo.”

“It’s not disrespectful to call him ‘little?’” I asked.

“Nope, it’s totally fine.”

“Really? That can’t be right. If my boss started calling me Little Erik, that wouldn’t go over too well.”

“It’s okay. Really. It’s a term of endearment, sort of.”

What a strange place I was in. I sat back and took in the surroundings.

As we made our way through traffic, Shanghai’s skyline started to come into view. We couldn’t have been more than a mile or two from Lujiazui, the financial district that forms the core of Shanghai’s modern cityscape, but I couldn’t see any of the buildings clearly.

“Wow, look at all that smog!” I said to Ming, who would be taken to her office as soon as I was dropped off at mine.

“Oh, that’s just mist, honey,” she reassured me.

“Mist? You’re kidding, right?”

“No, no. This is just mist. It’s misty today. And a little foggy.”

Scene from another planet? No, just a misty day in Shanghai.

Mist was a good euphemism for the filth that was surrounding us, and I had heard some locals describe it this way too. I’m sure that’s where she was getting the idea from. Who was I to argue? It’s not like a had an air pollution meter in my back pocket.

This smog was like nothing I had ever experienced. Even the smog that can be seen on a bad day in LA – America’s smog capital – was nothing compared to this. The only thing I can compare it with is seeing a brightly lit full moon through a light layer of cloud cover at dusk. The difference is that in Shanghai, you do this during the daytime, and the moon is actually the sun. You can even stare through this crust of debris directly at the sun and not have your eyes hurt.

“At least the smog is blocking out harmful UV rays,” I said. “That’s an advantage….isn’t it?”

This wasn’t scoring me any points. I closed my mouth and turned to look out the Buick window again.

After ten minutes, we seemed hardly any closer to my office, but the Lujiazui skyscrapers began to emerge from the haze. At least Little Leo seemed pleasant and not at all chatty.

China had become something of a playground for architects by this time, and world-renowned designers had been flocking to the country with their experimental blueprints. Some say that the results in places like Lujiazui are truly remarkable, leading some to compare Shanghai to New York City. Others lament the garishness and lack of a coordinated style. If I knew anything about architecture at all, my personality would probably put me in the latter group.

The first skyscraper of any kind in China was the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, which went up in the mid-nineties. While this odd looking tower is said to have been inspired by a Tang Dynasty poem, to me it appeared more to be inspired by a Jetsons cartoon. It consists of a tall lattice intersected by three orbs, one of which adorns the top of every page on the website of this blog. I could almost imagine George Jetson parking his space mobile next to it.

China’s tallest buildings: the Jetsons-esque Pearl TV Tower in the background, the Jinmao Tower in the middle, the bottle opener on the right and the to be completed corkscrew on the left.

The Pearl TV Tower was China’s tallest building until it was surpassed by a new neighbor a few years later, the Jinmao Tower. Even though Jinmao was designed in Chicago, it has a graceful Chinese character, evoking the shape of a traditional pagoda. I like this building. To me, as to many in the west, incorporating traditional Chinese style into new structures is a great way to modernize without casting aside China’s rich and unique history.

The Chinese themselves don’t seem to share this view. On a trip to Shanghai back in 2000, a Chinese friend tried to impress me with China’s progress by taking me to a Starbucks. Similarly, in 2007, the Shanghai World Financial Center went up right next to the Jinmao Tower, eclipsing it in height. Nothing about it suggests China. In fact, it looks like a giant bottle opener. Next up, slated to open in 2015, will be the Shanghai Tower, which will result in the skyline being dominated by the world’s tallest corkscrew.

The question going forward is will there be a Jinmao-type revival of Chinese architectural style or will the next building on the horizon be a giant electric can opener? Regardless of where you side in this weighty architectural debate, the comparison between New York and Shanghai doesn’t go much beyond the skyline.

Shanghai teems with every kind of traffic – cars, trucks, mopeds, bicycles, and tricycle carts with precariously balanced loads of junk piled impossibly high – all swerving, speeding, cutting each other off, passing in the oncoming traffic lane, driving on the shoulder whenever there is one, and generally risking their lives every few seconds for no reason that I could see. It just doesn’t make much sense to the outsider. Then there are the pedestrians walking in the street in active traffic lanes with their backs to the coming onslaught. Overloaded diesel-spewing trucks whip by, often missing them by just inches (and occasionally not).

You must admit that real skill is required to pull this off.

A guy wearing a suit on a moped with a cigarette dangling from his mouth zipped past us in the tiny aisle separating two lanes of cars, then suddenly darted diagonally to the other side of the intersection, without noticing or seemingly caring that he had just cut in front of a truck that slammed its brakes and swerved to avoid flattening him.

A woman riding a bicycle with an infant sitting behind her on a rack – not an infant seat, but a metal rack, the kind better suited for securing packages – veered directly into our path, causing Little Leo to take evasive action. If you see this kind of thing in New York City, even with its heavy and often chaotic traffic, it sticks out as something spectacular and unusual. But in Shanghai it’s a constant occurrence. It’s not uncommon to see a family of three – dad, mom and a young child – piled onto a moped navigating through this mayhem without helmets. Safety awareness just isn’t part of the culture.

Okay, I didn’t actually see anything this bad, and I suspect that Photoshop played a role here, but you get the idea.

Clearly, drivers have to be extremely vigilant so as not to accidentally mow down whatever appears in front of them. For a while, I thought that this cat-like readiness would help balance the situation and keep the accident rate in check. If all drivers are expecting dangerous moves at all times, perhaps it all works out in the end. But I checked some statistics and found that this was not the case. According to the China Traffic Safety Forum, in 2007, China recorded 5.1 road accident deaths for every 10,000 motor vehicles on the road, the highest on the planet. The world average is two deaths per 10,000 vehicles. The World Health Organization painted an even grimmer picture, reporting 445 deaths per 100,000 vehicles in China (almost 10 times worse than the figure that China reported), verses 15 deaths per 100,000 vehicles in the US, and only 7 in Switzerland. Traffic accidents remain one of the leading causes of death in the United States, but China’s fatal accident rate is nearly 30 times as bad!

Shanghai (l) and New York (r) both have traffic, but I’m not seeing the similarity.

The real problem is that 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, there were almost no cars at all in China. How do you teach a billion people to drive? In America, dad would take his son or daughter to an empty parking lot to practice in the old car. But until very recently, China didn’t have any old cars, parking lots, or dads that knew how to drive.

I later learned why Buicks had something of a following in China. Nearly a century ago, China’s last emperor was driven around in one (presumably without the cheap plastic interior that mine had). From my perspective, this unforgivable act of atrocious judgment should have been enough to foretell the emperor’s pending demise. But the Chinese people didn’t see it this way. Buick remained in their minds and imaginations so much so that in the late 1990s, GM reintroduced Buick to China as a high-end brand.

We completed the five-mile trip in 45 minutes. At this rate, I was doing nine-minute miles, which would have been impressive had I been traveling by foot. Our destination was Times Square, one of two places with this name in Shanghai. Little Leo stopped and pushed the button to open the sliding electric door for me, then pointed at a building across the street that housed my office. I dodged a line of mopeds, bicycles, pedestrians and taxis. Times Square was crowded, dirty, and had a faint smell of sewage to it. In this regard, Shanghai really was like its counterpart in New York, perhaps even worse.

As I passed through the main doorway into the new office complex, the chaos of Times Square evaporated behind me. The interior, with its marble floor and walls, and banks of elevators with sleek stainless steel doors, was in stark contrast to the turmoil and confusion I had just crossed through.

I had given myself more than ample time to make the journey, and I arrived a good half hour early. I used the time to look around the complex. It was part of an upscale mall with the lower floors housing such brands as Gucci, Brooks Brothers and Omega. Giant ads featured a variety of westerners. George Clooney showed off his Omega watch while driving a James Bond-esque boat. Next to him, a blonde European model was decked out head to toe in Gucci. This was the new China that everyone wanted a piece of. There were clearly two economies at play: the old world laborers and the new world business people. Shanghai was creating millionaires at a rate far surpassing the West, yet the city was still home to millions making barely a hundred dollars a month.

Also on the ground floor was Starbucks, McDonald’s and a sit-down Haagen Dazs ice cream cafe. I went into the Starbucks, and trying out my Chinese, ordered a zhong bei mei shi and a lan mei mai feng. The Chinese barista turned to her co-barista, also Chinese, and relayed to him in English: “Tall Americano and a blueberry muffin.” The co-barista then asked me, in English, if I wanted the muffin heated. I was going to pretend that I didn’t speak English, but thought better of it.

I found a comfy Starbucks chair at one of those round wooden Starbucks tables – the kind with that swirl of words like “sunny Costa Rica” and “Frappuccino latte” just as in any Starbucks the world over – and pondered the juxtaposition that I would come to see again and again in Shanghai: crazy and chaotic here, familiar and mundane there.

I finished my coffee and muffin and made my way to the 23rd floor to find my Shanghai staff waiting for me.

Let me backtrack just a little bit now so you understand the significance of what comes next in the story. While I was still in New York with the kids, about a month before we boarded the plane, my wife had managed to rent a house for us in Shanghai. She sent pictures and it seemed to be okay. The pictures even showed blue skies. For China that was really something extraordinary.

Our new home in China. It even came with a blue sky.

I had taken many trips to China since my initial visit to Changsha, but I couldn’t recall ever having seen an even faintly blue sky. As the economy had grown in recent decades, pollution had also increased on a similar scale. The country had been undergoing an industrial revolution and there was a price to be paid for the progress. I was very concerned about exposing my kids to such a polluted environment. The blue skies were a good sign; perhaps life would be better in the new China and we’d be able to live away from the contaminated output of the factories.

I was still far from being sold, though. I couldn’t put it into words at the time but I didn’t quite see this as the next stop on my, until now, slightly upward trajectory in life. It looked okay in the photos but without seeing it in person, it was hard to tell if this would be an acceptable place to live. Then she told me the address of the compound it was in:

One Long Dong Avenue

My fears and misgivings vanished in an instant. It was going to be okay. I was sure that I would soon play host to a steady stream of visitors – old friends, colleagues, and relatives would all want to visit Shanghai and experience this address first hand. There was simply nothing like it anywhere in the world. The best competition would have been Butt Hole Road in South Yorkshire, England, but that had been renamed to Archer’s Way over a decade ago for some unknown reason.

The opportunities for eighth grade humor would be practically limitless. If I could just get past the spam filters, this could be the beginning of a truly great string of emails. Perhaps it would even go viral.

I could tell the world that we had also considered houses on Short Dong Avenue and Small Nuts Drive, but for reasons of stature and accuracy we chose the Long Dong property instead. And we wouldn’t be moving to just anywhere on Long Dong Avenue. We would be at Number One, a number the Chinese hold in the highest esteem.

Even though “Long Dong” innocently means “East Dragon” in Chinese, the average Westerner would react similarly to the way Bill from the moving company did.

We were sitting in the dining room on Long Island filling out paperwork when he asked me if I had a destination address in China that he’d be able to understand. I told him that not only would he be able understand it, but that he’d be amused by it. Bill was a real New Yorker. He was from Queens and it seemed that this was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time. For the rest of the day, every time he was on his cell phone, no matter who he was talking to, he would announce amid howls of laughter, “You’ll never guess where this guy is moving to….. Long Dong Avenue….. That’s right…. Long… Dong…. Avenue. It’s an actual address in China. Can you believe it?” And then he’d say something like, “Well, we don’t exactly know what happened to your container, but I’ll call you back if the truck shows up.”

As the plane touched down15 hours later at Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport, I was optimistic. I was psyched about my new address, and even though the skies were just as gray and murky as they were on my earlier visits to China, I wasn’t going to let that spoil my enthusiasm. It had been a hard slog getting prepared for the big move and now that we were finally here, I was ready to settle in to our new home. We pulled into the Long Dong complex and drove up to the house. It looked nice, just as it did in the pictures.

As I got out of the car, though, I found myself standing next to an enormous problem. Not more than 30 yards from the side of the house was a 200-foot tall electrical transmission tower, the biggest one I had ever seen. Maybe this is what they meant by “Long Dong” in the address. Impressive as it was on some level, it was certainly not the type of Long Dong I wanted my family associated with. It was disgraceful.

The view from One Long Dong Avenue. This is worse than New Jersey.

“You’ve got to be kidding! How could you not mention this?” I said to Ming, somewhat bewildered.

“Oh that? What’s wrong with that?” she replied.

“What’s wrong with it? It’s the ugliest thing I’ve seen since that wedding in Bayonne, New Jersey!”

“Don’t get so excited, it’s not such a big deal,” she said.

I realized that I had raised my voice. Perhaps subconsciously I was trying to ensure that I could be heard above the hum of the transmission lines.

“You sent me all these nice pictures of the place, but none of them included this! In New York, we had a view of the harbor. And not only is this ugly, it’s probably dangerous too! What if it falls on the house? What if the kids try to climb it? What about electromagnetic radiation?”

Now I didn’t know for sure if any of these things posed a real hazard. Maybe it’s perfectly fine to live next to high voltage transmission lines. But I had young kids and I didn’t want to take chances.

So that was that. My mind was made up even before I entered the house. My dreams of living on what is perhaps the single greatest phallic symbol road on the planet were ruined. Trashed. Done for. The best I’d be able to do for visitors would be to take them for a drive through this neighborhood. Perhaps a few would still come.

We entered the house and I found that the furniture – we were renting the house furnished – consisted of over-sized sofas, a fake gold leaf table, and an overly elaborate chandelier. In China this is known as the Ornate European style. To me, and especially given my sour state-of-mind, it was just gaudy crap. It was a mishmash of cheap odds and ends thrown together with no rhyme or reason. I expressed my distaste for the decor without mincing words. Ming took this as an indication that I was having a tantrum. I told her that I most certainly was not. Then I stomped around the house for 20 minutes to prove my point.

When I was done and had calmed myself down, we decided that it would be a good idea to find a different place to live immediately. We had six weeks before our container on the boat from New York would arrive.

Sixteen years later, in the fall of 2009, I found myself living in Shanghai. This struck me as somewhat odd since despite returning many times since my initial visit, I still felt that the best thing about the country was seeing it grow smaller through an airplane window.

Granted, a lot had happened in those passing years. In fact, with the relentless advance of technology, the world had changed more during that time than in any other with the exception of the Big Bang and the 16 years following it. I was a different person too. I had matured (a little), had married a woman I met in business school, and was now the father of two wonderful children. And China had also changed drastically. Some urban pockets had emerged from the backwater shithole I first knew. Five star hotels and modern skylines had sprung up in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and the mushrooming economy was attracting ambitious people from all over the world.

Western companies were flocking to the country to jump on the bandwagon. There were many excellent reasons for moving to China at this point in history, and as much as I would like to claim one of them as my own motivation, my reason had been much simpler. It consisted largely of me having my head up my ass.

I had been watching television on a quiet Sunday afternoon when Ming, my lovely, elegant, refined, graceful, and all-around fantastic wife, entered the room and began her subtle ploy:

“Honey, can we move to China if I get a job there?”

“Oh that’s good, honey,” I mumbled as I switched to Swedish Kneading / Leg Compression, not knowing that it would change my life.

Following a golf ball as it flew over the fairway, I leaned forward in my chair and muttered, “Umm, hmm” as if she had reminded me to put a coaster under my glass of Blue Moon.

Oddly, she took this to mean, “Yes, I would be happy to move to China.” But what I clearly meant was, “That’s not happening, so please stop asking me distracting questions while I’m watching golf.” I really thought it was more of a hypothetical question anyway, along the lines of “If there was a Disneyland on Mars, and a spaceship leaving from JFK, could we go for a vacation?” I watched contentedly as Tiger made his birdie, unaware that my life was about to be irrevocably altered. (Woods, unable to keep his putter in his golf bag, was equally unaware of the coming change to his life.)

A month later, as I was sitting in the massage chair with it set to Swedish Kneading / Leg Compression, Ming said, “They offered me the job.”

“Oh, that’s good, honey” I mumbled. “Which job was that again?”

“You know, the real estate one.”

“Real estate?”

“Yeah, you know, the one in Shanghai.”

I tried to leap out of the chair, but the leg compressor only allowed me to hurt myself.

“China!” I said, “You’re not serious about that one?”

“Well, I am, and it’s a really great opportunity. It’s the CFO position.”

“But doesn’t that mean we have to move to China?”

“Yes, but you said we could.”

“But I didn’t really think you’d get that job or that you even really wanted it.”

“So you were lying when you said we could move to China?”

“Yes, of course, but only because I was trying to be supportive.”

And that was basically it.

I wanted to protest, but I was in a poor position. Ming was from China, and when we got married, I had said that maybe one day we could live there. Life had settled down nicely though, and I came to think that it would either never happen, or happen only in the very distant future. And, of course, I had agreed that day while watching golf – she had me there. Worst of all, it really was a great career opportunity and she had to give them an answer immediately. China was booming and it was now or never.

She signed the documents a few days later, and a week after that she packed a few suitcases, kissed me and the kids goodbye, and moved to Shanghai. I was expected to follow as soon as possible with our two young children and almost everything we owned. While this was an enriching, once in a lifetime experience that many families would jump at, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d be happier stuck in my relaxed suburban life. I suddenly realized how good I had had it. I had a short commute to a comfortable job, went sailing and played golf on weekends, owned a beautiful home that was walking distance to a private beach, lived close to my extended family, and all this while my wife stayed home with the kids. Until that moment I had grown complacent with it, but now it was obvious that it had been an idyllic life. It was too late now. Until this point, golf had only screwed me while I was playing it. I was going to be living in the country that I had once vowed never to set foot in again.

With Ming already living 12 time zones away and flying around in private jets, I was left to sort out the mess at home. So I put our house up for rent, listed our cars for sale, made arrangements with a moving company, and juggled the kids with nannies and grandparents while I kept working full time. My daughter was starting kindergarten and my son was starting pre-school. I was going to have to yank them out, get them enrolled in a good Chinese school for international kids (if there was one) and find a job for myself in China.

On a lark, I went into my boss’s office one morning and told him what had transpired:

“Listen Ted, I’ve got a problem.”

“If this is about the porn blocker, you have to talk to IT.”

“No, that’s not it. I have to move to China.”

“I understand, but I won’t help you move,” he said.

“Well I wasn’t going to ask you that, it’s just that I was wondering, is there any way I could continue working for the company in China?”

He paused for a moment. I almost hoped that he would suddenly burst out in uncontrollable laughter, and between gasps inform me that my skills weren’t relevant in China; that I had no choice but to take an extended vacation and bone up on my drinking skills. But there was no laughter.

“You know, we’re expanding in China, and I think we actually could use you there. Let me run it up the flagpole.”

A few days later, the answer came back. They would put me in charge of Greater China. This should have been great news, but it was all happening too fast.

Like many before me, I couldn’t help feeling that I had somehow been Shanghaied.

A month later the kids and I were sitting on the runway, waiting for takeoff. I had somehow pulled it off – the house was closed up, the cars were sold, the furniture was on a boat to China, and the kids were enrolled in an international school that had a great reputation. Things were starting to come together. The kids were excited about the move, but that mostly was because they were looking forward to seeing mommy again.

“Daddy, how long does it take to get to China?” my daughter asked.

“15 hours.”

“Is that longer than a month?” my son asked.

“Not quite, but it’s enough for you to get a full night’s sleep.”

“I’m not going to sleep at all!” my daughter boasted.

“I’m going to stay up too!”

Seeing their exuberance I started to feel a ray of hope. I had recently reflected to a colleague that in the past year my most exciting trip had been to an insurance industry event in Dayton, Ohio. I believe this had been a cry for help. Maybe that’s why I zoned out while my wife asked if I minded turning our world upside-down. On some level this was what I wanted – to get back out into the less familiar but challenging world I had traveled so often in my younger days. After all, how high on the bucket list does being comfortable rank?

I was heading off for a new adventure and I would just have to work things out for the best. It had been a long time since I had decided I didn’t like China. Perhaps I was just hanging on to an outdated notion of what life there could be. And though it was hard to admit to myself, I probably would have felt differently if it had been me who had initiated the move. Had that been the case, in all likelihood I would have been telling everyone that I always envisioned myself living in China, that it was the future economic center of the world, and that I loved the food.

The plane hurtled down the runway and we were off. I decided then and there that I was going to give it my best shot, if for no other reason than to show my kids that I wasn’t the type of person to let adversity defeat me. They needed someone to look up to in this new and distant world, and I was going to be the best father I could be. I’d be a beacon of dignity, honor and self-respect during these tumultuous times. Yes, I would give it everything I had! I was going to set an example by loving the country!

And if that didn’t work after a little while, I was going to mope around and teach them that even the bitterly disillusioned can make good fathers. Either way, we were all in for the ride of our lives.

About an hour after takeoff, the kids fell fast asleep and slept most of the way to Shanghai. I stayed awake the entire flight, trying to escape the feeling that like so many before me, I had somehow been Shanghaied.

I woke up dehydrated and with a splitting headache. I called Wing to make sure that we were still planning to meet downstairs for breakfast. There was no answer. Maybe he was sleeping it off, or maybe he was still slouched over in a chair in the restaurant. Either way, I needed food, so I headed downstairs.

Wing was in the restaurant all right. He was downing a bowl of congee and looking surprisingly fresh.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Ahh, heh heh, fine, fine.” he said as he took a big slurp of congee.

I wondered how this could be. I wasn’t used to having 20 drinks with dinner. Maybe he was.

I went over to the buffet and filled a bowl with congee. Looking at the other options, it was an obvious choice. Congee is a sort of rice soup often eaten with pickled vegetables for breakfast in Asia. It wasn’t exactly my idea of something to be consumed before noon, but compared to the Wheel of Death, it was nothing.

“So when do we head for the airport?” I asked Wing cheerfully as I sat down.

“Actually, our flight has been cancelled.”

“…What?”

“It’s okay. They booked us on another flight – different airline.”

“Oh, okay,” I said with relief, “when do we leave?”

“Thursday evening.”

“…What?” I said, hoping that this time something really had been lost in translation.

“Thursday evening – five-thirty.”

“What!? You mean in two days from now?”

“Yes, heh, heh,” he said matter-of-factly as if he had just pointed out that the fried noodles were to the right of the dumpling tray. “That is the next flight.”

“But my flight back to New York leaves Hong Kong on Thursday morning.”

“Yes, heh, heh.”

I wanted to choke him but there would be too many witnesses.

Maybe Wing didn’t mind two extra days deep in the Middle Kingdom, but I had a barbecue in the Hamptons to get to. The Hamptons seemed about as far as you could get from Changsha, in every possible way.

Since it was often nice to mix with the locals and get to know the flavor of a place, I decided I would make the most of this unexpected delay. We finished breakfast and with Wing as my guide, we headed out for a walking tour of the city.

The excursion started with Wing muttering about the unremarkable buildings just beyond the hotel entrance.

“This building is… uhh, maybe government office,” he said, “or it could be apartment building.”

It didn’t take long to figure out that Wing didn’t know much more about the area than I did, but he felt compelled to keep talking and guessing at our surroundings. We were ambling along at a pace appropriate for my hangover when I heard:

“Hhhhhuuukkkkk…”

A man ahead of us had gathered together the contents of his throat, then cocked his head down and to the right and let fly:

“Ptooooo!”

I adjusted my stride so as not to step in it. Wing either didn’t notice or didn’t care as he continued droning on about the buildings. His monotone sent me into a mild daze and I can only guess what he was saying. Probably something like:

“This is a building. It is made of concrete. It is extremely ugly. Nothing about the building would suggest that you’re in China. It is like every other building we’ve seen. It has a door, some walls, ceilings and floors. Some bits are rusted and the paint, if it has any, is peeling. It is of absolutely no significance whatsoever.”

Wing was clearly trying to impress me with his knowledge of mainland China. Perhaps his boss Harry told him he needed to sound like an expert.

Hong Kong companies like Harry’s have always tried to position themselves as intermediaries between east and west. But since Hong Kong had been a British colony since 1860 and with China closed to the outside world until the 1980s, many of these firms, especially in the early 90s, were just as clueless about China as the companies they represented.

In any case, what we needed from Harry’s company was expertise in getting deals done in China, not a tour of Changsha. With the sun punishing my already throbbing head, I would have been more impressed with Wing had he been able to keep his mouth shut.

Dodging a stream of bicycles and an old woman who tilted her head as she emitted a hearty “hhhhukk ptooey,” we entered a more crowded part of the city. Here I noticed more discharges of phlegm, first from a man on a bicycle and then from a mother with a baby. The ground was a veritable exposition of expectoration, and I had to watch my step.

I’ve heard many theories for all the spitting in China. Some say the heavy pollution requires people to spit out the filth they’ve been inhaling. Others say it’s simply a case of bad manners or poor upbringing. My own view is that it’s a massive fit of the willies. Having shared so much saliva with so many people from so many sets of chopsticks at so many meals, they feel an uncomfortable and continuous need to expel it at intervals onto the street.

Whatever the reason, spit was flying everywhere: it was like having a box seat at a major league baseball game. At least the Chinese were cultured enough not to adjust their jocks and slap each other on the butt, and for this they deserve credit.

We ducked into a local restaurant to escape the heat. An air conditioning unit blasted me as we walked toward an empty table. It felt great. We then sat down a few steps away where the A/C had no cooling effect whatsoever, possibly because it was positioned next to a row of open windows. They might just as well have set it up on the street ­– at least then it wouldn’t have been so loud.

Wing looked at the menu.

“Do they have General Tso’s Chicken?” I asked, hoping to finally sample my favorite Chinese dish in China.

“Ahhh, yes, I order for you,” he nodded, but I wasn’t sure if he knew what I meant.

What arrived was definitely not General Tso’s Chicken. I wasn’t sure what it was. I ruled a few things out – it wasn’t eyeballs, snakes, dog, or shoelaces. Several more dishes appeared. I think I recognized one from the night before. Wing mumbled through lunch. I caught a few words here and there. It was like listening to a poorly tuned radio.

Wing and everyone around us slurped nearly everything they ate. I hoped that my lack of slurping wouldn’t cause offense. If it did, no one said so. The meal wasn’t bad. Perhaps I was getting used to this strange place. As we were finishing, I realized I hadn’t seen a fortune cookie since leaving New York. I hadn’t seen them in Hong Kong and I had yet to see them in China. I didn’t think they weren’t offered at the Wheel of Death dinner, but given my condition I couldn’t be sure.

“What about fortune cookies? Isn’t it a Chinese tradition to have a fortune cookie at the end of a meal?”

“Fortune cookie?”

Wing had no idea what I was talking about, something I was also getting used to.

We set out back through the bicycles and characterless neighborhoods until finally the bleak sightseeing tour was over. As we headed toward the elevator, Wing said,

“We meet later and see more of Changsha?”

I detected not the slightest hint of irony in his voice. By this point I couldn’t bear more of Changsha or, for that matter, of Wing’s company. Wing needed to learn that if he was going to form enduring relationships with his clients, he would have to be quiet every now and then. As a professional, I felt it was my duty to tell him this. So I took a deep breath and said,

“I’d love to, but I’m really not feeling very well. I’m going to rest this afternoon.”

Why should I have to be the one to tell him that he was a pain in the ass? I decided to leave that for someone with more tact.

I rested happily in my room that afternoon, then ordered one of the three dishes that was listed in English on the room service menu: Spaghetti Bolognaise.

After fiddling with the various Chinese labeled buttons on the TV remote, I stumbled upon CNN. This was a remarkable and most welcome discovery. I happily caught up on world news, delivered in American English as if I was sitting on my sofa back home.

The spaghetti arrived, and while welcome and also filling, a better name for it would have been “Spaghetti with Watery Ketchup.”

After a while, the stories on CNN started to repeat themselves so I flipped through the channels and found what appeared to be a Chinese variety show. It involved a man in a bright blue jacket and an even brighter red tie moderating some sort of singing competition. Between performers, he yelled into the microphone and the audience cheered.

I watched this for a while and then switched back to CNN. I continued this routine for the next two days, during which time I got to sample the other two English language food items: the tuna fish sandwich, which remarkably wasn’t bad, and the rice balls. I first thought rice balls were something that you got from riding in a dirty rickshaw with loose shorts, but it turned out to be a decent side dish.

Every few hours a new story was inserted into the CNN rotation, and this lifted my mood. But after my fourth viewing of the story about the trial of the officers involved in the Rodney King affair and a related feature about whether the City of Angels was going to hell, I broke down and nearly called Wing. Instead, I ordered another plate of Spaghetti with Watery Ketchup.

Finally it was Thursday evening and as I walked with Wing toward the Russian Express – the Tupolev that I expected would fly us back to Guangzhou, from where we would catch the train back to Hong Kong – it became clear that it was not a Tupolev at all.

“Yeah, G’day, ladies and gentlemen,” came the announcement in perfect Australian after I settled into my seat, “this is your Captain speaking….”

The world wasn’t making sense to me, just as it hadn’t for the past week. But this time it was in a good way.

“Our flight to Hong Kong today will take an hour and forty-five minutes,” continued the good news from the cockpit.

That’s me at the Changsha airport, happily learning that I wasn’t headed for the “Russian Express”

Summoning my enormous powers of reason which consisted principally of perusing the literature in the seat pocket in front of me, I worked out that I was aboard a Dragon Air Boeing 737 and that Dragon Air was a Hong Kong based operation that hired foreign pilots.

When we got to Hong Kong, the city felt different. A few days earlier, it was a foreign place with a distinctly Chinese flavor. But after mainland China, it was a familiar and welcoming place. In the taxi, we passed glittering skyscrapers as we glided through orderly traffic. The friendly clerk at the New World Harbour View Hotel (now the Renaissance) quickly checked me in. I proceeded, without passing a single floor guard, to a room with incredible views of Victoria Harbour. The Italian restaurant downstairs was not only elegant, but also had real Spaghetti Bolognaise. In Hong Kong, I was as good as home.

I flew back to New York the next day, and made it to that barbecue in the Hamptons the day after. As I chatted with friends and recounted my Chinese adventure of the past few days, I appreciated how nice my surroundings were and how truly fortunate I was to not have to live in a place like Changsha.

I vowed that if it was at all within my power, for the rest of my life I would never again set foot in mainland China.

We got back to the hotel around five. I was planning on a quick nap to feel human again, and then a light meal at the hotel restaurant. I was tired enough that I was actually looking forward to the sheet-covered wooden board that masqueraded as my bed.

“See you for dinner at seven,” I said to Wing as he opened the message he just collected at the front desk.

Without waiting for his response I headed straight for the elevator. I passed a man pushing dirt around with a filthy mop and had the elevator in sight when I heard footsteps gaining on me.

“Heh heh,” he said, as I reached for the button, “Good news!”

“Really?” I asked, hoping he had found an earlier flight back to Hong Kong.

“We’re having dinner here with our hosts from the PLA.”

“Dinner?”

“Yes, they will be here soon.”

“For Christ’s sake, Wing, you must befuckingkidding me!” I thought as I said, “That’s great. Please call me when they get here.”

Despite my lack of enthusiasm, this was theoretically a good thing and in any event I was ready to tuck into a plate of General Tso’s chicken and a bowl of hot and sour soup, followed by a few orange slices and a fortune cookie. Back in my room I managed to splash some water on my face and lay down for a few minutes before Wing knocked on the door.

I was worried about the business conversation, and hoped the soldier would be there to help with the translations. Otherwise the back and forth would be bounded by the limits of Wing’s Mandarin, and we would be spending the next two hours exchanging pleasantries like “soup good food,” “China big country,” and “America far away.” Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

Wing and I sat down in a private room off the main dining room at a large circular table on which sat a glass Lazy Susan. About ten people were already there. The soldier was not among them.

Introductions were made in the usual Asian way. One by one, we shook hands, then, facing one another, each presented, with two hands, a business card to the other. This had happened a few days earlier in Hong Kong too. It’s intended as a form of respect, but I found it a little awkward. If each person uses both hands to present a card, there comes an uncomfortable moment when one of them has to take a hand away to accept the new card. It was a game of chicken – who was willing to risk offending the other by releasing his own card first? Not knowing when to let go, I decided not to. They each eventually caved, which is fortunate, otherwise I might still be standing there.

One reason that cards are exchanged in this manner is to give the recipient time to make a connection between the name, face and title of each person. Most of the cards were printed only in Chinese – a few had English on the reverse side, though no one tried to greet me in English – and the names were hard to understand, much less pronounce. We sat down around the table and I realized that I had no idea who was who or who did what. And why did all these army people have cards anyway?

Several waiters and waitresses, who had been standing by the walls, came to the table, opened beer bottles and filled our glasses. One of the hosts, a thin man missing a front tooth, stood up to make a toast. I figured he was in charge, so I took to thinking of him as “the colonel.”

I worried I wouldn’t be able to make sense of Wing’s translation.

“Mutual China-America cooperation and friendship, and the great city of Changsha with the visitor of honor from New York and the great teleconferencing mutual benefit of friends.”

I was right to worry. We were also back to teleconferencing again. Terrific, I sighed to myself.

“Gan bei!” exclaimed the colonel as he began drinking his beer.

“Cheers!” Wing translated.

I had a sip of my beer and put it down. I then noticed that the colonel and all his lieutenants had emptied their glasses. Wing had emptied his too.

I had been to college and was good at this, so I didn’t bother pressing the point. I chugged my beer and placed the empty glass on the table. The colonel and his lieutenants smiled and said something.

“They say you very good drinker,” Wing translated.

I was a good drinker, and maybe this would be a nice evening after all.

Before I had a chance to order my General Tso’s chicken, one of the waiters placed a plate of food on the turntable. The colonel then rotated the dish to me. It was unrecognizable – nothing like the Chinese food I had grown up eating. I wasn’t sure if it was meat, vegetable or fish. It didn’t look like any of these. Several of the lieutenants were smiling at me and motioning for me to eat. One of them, a lady, even said “please.” She was one of the few who had English on the back of her card. I decided to think of her as the “foreign liaison officer.”

I understood that it was an honor to be offered the first taste, but a quick sniff was really all I needed to determine that it wasn’t stomach-worthy. As they eyed me cautiously I recalled that in ancient times, the Chinese Emperor would have a food taster test his meals to ensure they were safe. I considered insisting that someone else have a go, but instead relented and took a bite of this slippery treat.

The battalion – as I started to think of the group – looked pleased as a waiter filled the small shot glasses in front of each of us with a clear liquid. I took a whiff and recognized it immediately. This was definitely something I knew from back home – jet fuel.

Another one of the men stood up, made some remarks to me and cried, “Gan bei!” Down the hatch went the jet fuel.

Wow! I checked to see if flames had scorched my seat.

“This is called bai jiu or white wine,” Wing said.

“Wing, there’s no way this is white wine.”

“Oh, yes, heh heh, white rice wine,” he clarified. “They like to drink it a lot a lot.”

At least it would help me get the food down.

The Lazy Susan spun again and I continued to sample unrecognizable foods that to my Western palette were either too soft, too slimy, too fatty, or all three of these at once. Several times I thought, “dog meat, I bet this is dog meat.” Evidently the Chinese palette was much broader than what I was accustomed to. As soon as I sampled each new dish, the rest of the battalion would dig in.

Every so often one of them would stand up and toast me individually with a glass of bai jiu. The ones on the far side of the table would walk around to make their toast with me.

The foreign liaison officer even came around to make a toast.

“Cheers!” she said.

“Oh, your English is very good.”

“Ah?” she replied.

“Cheers!” I said.

“Oh, cheers!” she smiled back as we finished off our shots.

Wing sometimes got toasted too. But they weren’t toasting each other. It didn’t take a mathematician to figure out that I was drinking a lot more than they were.

Despite my better instincts I kept eating and kept drinking, washing the food down with beer instead of bai jiu whenever I could.

“He said you very good with chopsticks and wants to know where you learn,” Wing translated for one of the lieutenants.

“My dad taught me to use them when I was a kid. I come from a small town, but we had four or five Chinese restaurants there. We have Chinese restaurants all over America.”

This seemed to surprise and amuse them.

“Which is better, the Chinese food here or the Chinese food in America?” the colonel asked.

I thought for a moment how best to evade this diplomatic trap, but the bai jiu had started to get the better of me.

“It is an impossible comparison since I believe that many of the foods here are not legal in America.”

Wing coughed lightly, paused, said “Heh heh,” then conveyed my response in an agreeable tone. The man answered Wing happily and the battalion smiled, then continued chattering lightly among themselves. Wing looked down at his plate.

I was certain Wing didn’t have the courage to translate my original statement. That was probably a good thing.

As the eating proceeded, it become clear that we were all digging into the same common dishes without using any sort of serving utensils. The only way to transfer food from the common dishes to our own was by using chopsticks – the same saliva-covered chopsticks that just came out of our mouths. Wasn’t this an enormous violation of basic hygiene? If one of us was sick, wouldn’t we all now be sick? What if someone had a communicable disease?

At the Chinese meals I had in Hong Kong—and certainly the ones I had in the US—there were always serving spoons, or sometimes two sets of chopsticks, a “public” set for transferring and a “private” set for eating. Yet the battalion was completely fine with all the double dipping.

They must do it all the time, I thought. Was I being culturally insensitive? I considered the possibility that I was framing this in terms of my own background and that I needed to be more accepting of other customs and less judgmental of foreign cultures.

Then I pulled my head out of my ass. Of course this wasn’t my problem! They were being insensitive to the realities of hepatitis, H Pylori, stomach flu and god knows what else. I had dined in 40 other countries, and never saw this to be the practice. How could five thousand years of Chinese culture miss out on such a basic advancement in human health? And considering, as I learned later, that the hepatitis infection rate among Chinese people at that time was at least 1 in 10 and I was dining with 10 people, what were my odds? I had unwittingly entered into the food version of Russian Roulette. In later years I would come to call this type of dining the “Wheel of Death.”

The difference between Russian Roulette and the Wheel of Death was that there were no winners in the Wheel of Death. Everyone had to eat.

This can't possibly be a good thing.

I decided then and there that I could no longer partake in this unhealthy practice. Even at the risk of insulting the People’s Liberation Army of China, I was going to have to find a way to avoid foreign saliva for the remainder of the night, no matter the cost.

This line of thinking prevailed for a while. The colonel and his lieutenants took turns toasting, and shouting gan bei as I pushed food around my plate. One advantage I had was that the new dishes came to me first, so I could fill up a little before the contamination stage (though who knows what was going on in the kitchen).

A young lieutenant with thick glasses slurred a few sentences then ended with “gan bei!”

I couldn’t tell if Wing’s translations were improving with the bai jiu.

Despite a few attempts on my part, broad statements like this were the closest we got to talking business.

A few more gan beis and I was eating directly from the common plates, not even bothering to transfer anything to my own plate first. My inhibitions were rapidly disappearing.

“Tell Lieutenant What’s-His-Face that I’m part Irish, so alcohol has no effect on me,” I said to Wing.

I felt like I was back in college playing silly drinking games. I just couldn’t quite figure out why I was doing it in Changsha with the Chinese army, and why they were interested in voice mail, or business in general.

I later learned that the Chinese army was much more involved, especially in those days, in business – almost any kind of business – than it was in the typical things you might associate an army with, like fighting and killing. I also learned that it’s a Chinese custom for business people to get very drunk together, and spend very little time talking about the relevant business issues. Only if you’re plastered out of your head does the real truth come out, and so if you haven’t gotten to that stage with potential business partners, they won’t feel that they can trust you. Who knew that American college life would provide such thorough training for doing business in China?

And just like in college, I kept drinking, laughing, toasting and drinking until all at once I didn’t feel so well. Wing hadn’t had as much to drink as me, but he wasn’t in good shape either. His translating had turned into an occasional low mutter to himself. Suddenly, he got up, staggered to the corner and slumped down onto a couple of chairs. This didn’t faze the wait-staff in the least.

The lieutenant to the left of Wing was faring only slightly better. His face was red and he looked unsure of his whereabouts. The men were all lighting up cigarettes now and he stood up momentarily, perhaps to ask for one, then sat back down and pulled his chair in as if he had just arrived. He then put his face down on the table and went to sleep.

I said my goodbyes and stumbled away from the table. Soon I was back in my room, though I have no recollection of the elevator or the hallways. I puked in the bathroom, and passed out on the bed.

I had survived the Wheel of Death. Now only a hangover and a flight stood between me and Hong Kong.

“I’m here today to talk to you about voice mail, and the global trends we are seeing.”

Wing began translating, but half way through the first sentence, he paused, then made a long “ummm” sound just as he did with Mr. Disheveled. He then seemed to restart the sentence, perhaps taking a different tack. Almost immediately he was back to “ummm, ummm” followed by “heh heh.”

I looked to him waiting for the signal that he was done. But he kept talking, and he kept ummming. Finally he finished.

“Many telecom carriers have discovered voice mail to be the new killer application driving traffic to their networks, especially to their cellular networks,” I said cautiously, pausing before biting off more than Wing would be able to chew.

We were still on the first slide. This is going to be a long afternoon, I thought, glancing at the thick stack of remaining slides.

Wing knew the industry well and had been working with us for some time. But I had yet to say anything complicated or technical. Surely he knew the Chinese terms for things like “voice mail,” “telecom carrier” and “global trends.” Didn’t he?

Maybe he was just losing his mind. Either way, I was starting to lose mine. I plodded on, hoping things would improve.

Apartment building? Army headquarters? Bank? Conference center? It was hard to tell as many buildings in Changsha looked like this in those days.

Wing got more and more nervous and his “heh hehs” became more and more frequent. I was sure we were losing the audience. At this point it probably would have been equally effective if I turned to charades to act out the presentation. It couldn’t be worse than what was happening now. My annoyance level was rising rapidly but I was also beginning to feel bad for Wing. He had done a lot of work to get us here and now it was all going south. What a disaster.

A few more slides went by and you could almost hear a collective sigh from the audience as Wing searched for the right words, or any words at all. I was wondering if we would have been better off had Harry sent us to the wrong city when a man raised his hand. Wing called on him.

“This man can speak both Cantonese and Mandarin,” Wing quietly told me with an almost confessional look on his face.

So that was the problem! Wing’s Mandarin was terrible.

I knew that coming from Hong Kong, Wing mainly spoke Cantonese, but he had assured us that he also spoke Mandarin. I thought Mandarin was similar to Cantonese anyway and that it wouldn’t be a big deal. Clearly I was wrong. Wing’s Mandarin seemed quite serviceable when we were getting around town, eating and even exchanging money. Now I realize he was probably constructing Mandarin phrases on the order of “please take Honky hotel” and “we eat food hungry.” This would explain the trouble he had earlier with Mr. Disheveled.

And so it was that we proceeded: I said it in English, Wing translated effortlessly into Cantonese and the helpful guy from the audience–I’ll call him “the soldier”– translated it into Mandarin. Despite the tedium of this three stage communication, the audience, exactly as promised, seemed highly interested. Their heads followed us as if they were watching a triangular ping-pong match. They even stopped to explore topics in greater depth a few times. Most of the questions proceeded through this long chain of translation via the soldier and Wing to me in English, with the answer finally arriving back to the audience in Mandarin.

It wasn’t very efficient, but it was working. A few of the questions only made it as far as Wing, who was able to answer them himself in Cantonese. Some of the questions were even fielded directly in Mandarin by the soldier. My mood began to improve.

At the end, the audience even applauded. Imagine, a kid from Long Island getting a round of applause from the Chinese army! Maybe they were just happy it was over. We left the stage.

We soon found ourselves in a cab heading back to the hotel. I had learned a lot about China in a very short time, I thought. Part of me wanted to stick around to learn more, but fortunately it was a small part of me and was easily overpowered by the much more formidable part of me that was looking forward to a quiet dinner and the next flight back to Hong Kong the following afternoon.

Little did I know that there was one more obstacle I’d have to surmount before leaving. It was a horrifying tradition – the ultimate test a Westerner could ever come up against in China. I would have to survive the Wheel of Death.

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